Whale Fall

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What to expect

Including poems specially adapted into melody and song for this audiobook.

One of The New York Times Best Audiobooks of 2024
A BBC ‘BETWEEN THE COVERS’ BOOK CLUB PICK

'I didn't want it to end' - Maggie O'Farrell
'Powerful . . . written with a calm, luminous precision' - Colm Tóibín
An Observer Best Debut of the Year

It is 1938 and on an island off the coast of Wales, Manod is trying to imagine her future. Her choices are stark: she must either stay and look after her father's house, in the wild landscape that drove her mother to madness, or marry and leave. And so, when two English anthropologists arrive on the island, Manod senses the possibility of a thrilling new life. But, as she becomes entangled in their work, and their strange relationship, the outside world she had yearned for appears a much darker place than she could ever have imagined.

Elizabeth O’Connor’s beautiful, devastating debut Whale Fall tells a story of longing and betrayal set against the backdrop of a world on the edge of great tumult.

'The quiet cadences of Whale Fall contain a deep melody of loss held and let go. It is a gentle, tough story about profound change' - Anne Enright

Critics Review

Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery
Guardian
O’Connor’s beautifully evocative debut explores the liminal spaces between aspiration and disappointment, adolescence and adulthood, land and sea . . . a highly impressive coming-of-age tale
The Observer
An excellent debut . . . Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude
New York Times
A beautifully nuanced, beguiling first novel, which leaves room for hope. O’Connor has a promising career ahead
The Times
An astonishingly assured debut that straddles many polarities: love and loss, the familiar and the strange, trust and betrayal, land and sea, life and death. O’Connor has created a beguiling and beguiled narrator in Manod: I loved seeing the world through her eyes, and I didn’t want it to end
Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait
An exquisite, evocative coming-of-age story that takes place in a world on the cusp of great change
The Observer, Debuts of the Year 2024
A powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiselled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy
Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician and Brooklyn
The quiet cadences of Whale Fall contain a deep melody of loss held and let go. It is a gentle, tough story about profound change
Anne Enright, Booker Prize winning author of The Wren, the Wren
A delicate piece of fiction, otherworldly in theme, supple and assured in prose. It feels rooted in its historical setting . . . yet forwards looking in its concerns
TLS
Quietly powerful first novel . . . Writing with graceful minimalism . . . O’Connor gently pulls together the book’s threads, evoking the mismatch between hidebound locals and fleet-footed incomers whose passing whims exact a heavy emotional toll
Daily Mail
I absolutely adored Whale Fall, I fell completely under its spell. Every sentence rang with clarity and authenticity. It's a triumph
Elizabeth Macneal, bestselling author of The Doll Factory
This poised debut balances betrayal and loss with change and self-realisation
Mail on Sunday
A haunting, unhurried, unusual debut, that vividly evokes the life of a teenage girl on a sparsely populated Welsh island in 1938 . . . O’Connor offers a clear-eyed exploration of our tendency to fetishize the rural, the isolated, and what it means to become an object of study
Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre
O’Connor’s spare, incisive prose brings the island to vivid life — both its frequent devastations as well as its resolute continuity . . . Beguiling and compelling
Boston Globe
Mesmerising. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite
Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing . . . transporting and utterly beautiful
Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt - beautiful
Lizzie Pook, author of Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge
An evocative, slow-burn tale
The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen
Kirkus
O'Connor's precise and spare prose feels at once claustrophobic and full of possibility, while emulating the interior of her yearning protagonist. A notable debut imbued with the pain of buried promise
Booklist
Genuine and captivating, Whale Fall has a wonderful blend of complexity and heart that will give every reader something to think about for weeks after finishing it
Michigan Daily
[O'Connor] conjures up a mood of things on the cusp: adulthood, the end of a community, and, given the time it’s set, war. It’s also a period when competing ideologies froth and broil against each other, and O’Connor captures all this, and more, in the subtlest of shades
Crack Magazine
Slender but vibrant, like a watercolour painted outside
Perspective
Brewing with erotic tension and set against a breathtaking, thankless, windswept landscape, Whale Fall beautifully captures that knot of contradicting feelings we have on the cusp of adulthood, wishing to leave the place of one’s birth
Something Curated

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